Gentoo KDE Project

1.  Project Description

The KDE project consists of two teams that manage the KDE and Qt ebuilds within Gentoo, which include all KDE applications. However, some KDE applications might belong to specific herds due to the fact that the KDE project cannot maintain all of them properly, as there are too many applications and many of them are not used by the KDE maintainers. Nevertheless, the project does support the teams that do manage these applications, and will ensure that they use the KDE eclasses appropriately.

2.  Project Goals

The goal of the Gentoo KDE team is to provide working support for all packages supported by the KDE Project. We also support as many underlying packages as necessary in order to have a properly working KDE environment.

3.  Current situation

KDE-3.5

The latest stable version of KDE in the official Portage tree is 3.5.10.

KDE-4

The latest major version of KDE in the official Portage tree is 4.3. The KDE 4 series is only available via split ebuilds. New sub-minor releases (e.g. 4.3.1) are released every month. Unless there are any setbacks, they are stabilised within a month after their addition to the Portage tree.

4.  KDE4 Overlays

Official Gentoo KDE overlays

Some additional applications, as well as snapshot and live ebuilds for KDE 4, are located in the official kde-testing overlay, available via layman. Things in there are considered not stable enough for the tree, but are used for testing. If you are a bold and daring Gentoo user, you can help us with testing these ebuilds.

The KDE 3 testing, and in future also maintainance, overlay is called kde-sunset and also available via layman. This overlay is planned to contain aggressive changes to the KDE 3 build system and is maintained by tampakrap these days. Due to the planned removal of KDE 3 from the Portage tree, it will soon become a user overlay in which KDE 3 will be left to be maintained by users (new packages, updates, etc.).

There is also an overlay for testing Qt development versions and new Qt4 applications. This is called qting-edge, and also available via layman. It contains snapshots and live ebuilds for the official Qt code, as well as qt-copy, which is patched by KDE.

Please see the Gentoo Overlays Users's Guide to get all information on how to use overlays. You can get support for these overlays on the #gentoo-kde IRC channel.

5.  Meeting logs and summaries

The KDE team holds regular meetings in #gentoo-meetings on the third Thursday of every month at 19:00 UTC. Whenever there is a meeting, it will be announced together with the agenda in the topic of #gentoo-kde. Summaries of each meeting will be available here, along with raw logs for public viewing.

6.  Support and assistance

There are several ways to get support with KDE related issues. You can:

• Join #gentoo-kde on the Freenode IRC network. You'll find some of the team members there most of the time.
• Address your concerns in the Gentoo Forums. Not all of us are avid forums users but many experienced users and some developers are likely to be able to help you.
• Of course, you can also file a bug report at Gentoo's Bugzilla (do not forget to add your emerge --info and the output of emerge -pv <package>).
• To install KDE on Gentoo, use the Gentoo KDE Guide. This guide covers the installation of KDE 3.5, KDE 4, and the various KDE 3/4 applications, and also provides some FAQ, hints, and troubleshooting sections.
• Read a tutorial on writing Qt4-based ebuilds.

7.  How *you* can help

The main thing that needs doing is trawling through the current open bugs and finding those that are stale, or those that have an equivalent on KDE's Bugzilla.

You'll find a current list of open bugs here: http://tinyurl.com/3bpdlv. Major issues: http://tinyurl.com/ll7wdv. Minor issues: http://tinyurl.com/nvgjqa. QT issues: http://xrl.us/qtbugs.

For those that are stale, you should ask if on the bug if the problem remains in the latest version. If someone has already done this and the reporter (or someone else experiencing the same problem) has not replied it should be marked NEEDINFO.

Speaking of bugs - now you can become a Herd Tester, too! You'll find all the necessary information about what a Herd Tester is and does on the KDE Herd Testers Project Page.

• Currently trusted users: HACKERS
• Current team plans: TODO
• Hints for packagers (also for other devs): CODE

Finally, it would be great to chat to you on IRC, too - this is how we normally get to know each other. Please drop into #gentoo-kde and chat with us. If you have any problems or questions, feel free to /query individual team members or ask in #gentoo-kde, #gentoo-desktop or #gentoo.

8.  Developers

All developers can be reached by e-mail using nickname@gentoo.org.

9.  Subprojects

The KDE project has the following subprojects:

10.  Herds

The KDE project maintains the following herds: